Best practices for business lead generation

Your lead generation strategy is paramount to your business success. Generating business leads offers new opportunities to grow your client base and expand your organization’s horizons, it’s the backbone of business growth. Once systems are in place, it’s easy to switch on autopilot and churn out the same tactics continuously yielding a similar result. But to see B2B lead generation success and continue growing your organization, we need to put the care back into our efforts. These best practices will give your business lead generation a new lease of life, helping you achieve the outstanding results your business deserves.

Use high quality data

Over 80% of B2B marketing departments say they’re driven by data, yet many lack what’s needed to execute campaigns. Using high quality, complete sets of data to fuel your lead generation efforts can improve results tenfold as campaigns become highly targeted. 79% of buyers will only engage with a marketing communication if it’s personalized or tailored to their previous behaviour; with this in mind, it’s easy to see the impact campaigns benefited by data can have. However, 60% of organizations express a struggle in producing fully personalized marketing campaigns due to a lack of correct data or a lack of technical capability to use data in this way.

To conduct advanced campaigns and see consistently improving results, you need to take time now to sort your data, segmenting it for marketing benefit and working to complete missing sections. This can be time consuming and gruelling, but it’s a vital part of mastering lead generation. And with new regulations surrounding personal data, you’ll need to always ensure data is treated appropriately and legally.

Top Tip: If you’re looking for some high-quality data, why not turn to your CRM? Featuring data for lapsed customers and unconverted leads, this is a great place to extract valuable data you can nurture back into your sales pipeline.

Quality over quantity

With business lead generation, we’re always hungry for more; more leads equal better results. Whilst generating a higher number of leads offers you increased new business opportunities, if they’re not leads of high quality and won’t have a chance of selling, then what’s the point of spending money generating them at all? It’s bad for return on investment and hinders your sales team’s success too. The focus needs to be quality as much as quantity, if not more. Gathering 30 leads, 10 of which sell is better than gathering 50 leads where only 8 sell- you spend less for more sales, a win-win.

Whilst gaining purely high-quality leads is virtually impossible (you’ll always get some slip through the gaps!), there are a few little changes you can make to promote better business lead quality:

Implement a marketing lead qualification system: Before passing leads over to your sales team, put them through a few small but vital checks to ensure they fit your product. For example, if you sell to B2B businesses, make sure leads aren’t B2C. If you sell website plug-ins, ensure leads have a website. Also monitor responses for qualification– if they replied to an email saying “OK”, does that count as a lead for your sales team to contact? Work with you sales team and agree on the basic criteria needed to qualify leads, so you can discount any leads with no chance of selling.

Practicalize your product through content: A content strategy is hugely beneficial for lead generation and offers the opportunity for you to carefully weave your product into its subject matter. If you’re selling HR software and construct a content eBook about current HR pain-points, you’re offered the perfect opportunity to delve deeper into your software and explain how it works on a daily basis to solve those pain-points. This improves lead quality, as those generated through content have a pre-made understanding of how they will use your product to boost their daily activities- part of the sales work is done!

Instead of focusing on how to get more leads, focus on how to get more leads successfully through your pipeline; look to the end-to-end journey.

Generate through nurture

Lead generation is often achieved thanks to a call-to-action guiding the prospects to inquire and therefore convert into a lead, but looking to our focus on quality, we need to remember the importance of lead nurture too. If you received an email that simply said, “New HR software- sign up now for your trial!”- you of course, wouldn’t do anything! You know nothing about this software.

This is the vital role nurture plays; it informs prospects about what you’re offering and how it can help them, so when a call-to-action is encountered, prospects feel ready to sign up for that trial.
Nurture can happen in many forms. On a landing page or in an email, it can be a short description, some bullet points or a paragraph- just enough to get prospects asking questions. This form of nurture elicits a quick conversion, generating leads with plenty of questions wanting more. Nurture can also take time, where a prospect encounters several pieces of content and maybe attends an event before they’re ready to come forward. This lead nurture takes more time, but often produces a lead of higher quality, as they don’t have so many questions and are further along the buyer journey.

The important thing to take from this is the value of nurture in your lead generation; think carefully about what message(s) you share across your campaigns when conducting demand generation. Make sure you’re always communicating your core values and key product benefits alongside a call to action, to help increase both B2B lead generation and lead quality.

Report in pipelines

Reporting on results to better analyse future strategy will be nothing new to marketers. Business lead generation is no exception, but many still find it a struggle to analyse report after report of dense numbers. Try reporting your channels in pipeline form, gaining advanced insight into what’s best for your B2B lead generation future.

A pipeline report measures every metric used in the end-to-end journey, from putting a marketing campaign out, right through the lead generation and pipeline nurture onto the sale. The numbers are displayed in this order, offering a visualization of your marketing/sales pipeline, so numbers all feed into each other. For example, a simple pipeline for website conversion might measure website visitors, website visitor conversions and website leads sold. Here you can see the pipeline from overall visitors through conversion to clients. A more complicated pipeline contains extra metrics and measurements, pertaining to channels such as email marketing and content. For example, a content marketing pipeline might measure the number of assets in circulation, the number of page views per asset, the number of downloads, clicks and conversions then onto the numbers of leads sold.

Measuring these more complicated pipelines may seem a lot of work but the information they offer is so valuable, as marketers can easily understand what part of their B2B lead generation strategy is failing them. If a content asset sees plenty of downloads but few conversions, there’s a CTA problem. If a content page sees plenty of visits but few downloads, the landing page needs work.

Thanks to your pipeline reporting, when there’s a discrepancy in results you know the precise areas that need attention, ensuring any hindrances are quickly resolved. This better focuses your efforts to have maximum impact for improved business lead generation.

Capture website information

Your website is key to online lead generation. Every campaign you conduct online, be it content, email or social media, all return in some way to your website. For the ultimate in business lead generation, you need to capture vital information from your website including analytics of your audience and their behaviour.

Lead Forensics is the perfect tool for advanced lead generation strategy, capturing a vast amount of website information and identifying the businesses visiting your site. Using reverse IP tracking, Lead Forensics provides the names and addresses of visiting business, along with contact details for key decision makers and a full breakdown of the time they spent on your site.

Fuel your sales pipeline with business leads whist gaining an invaluable understanding of how audiences interact with your website, and how it can be improved to see better return from marketing campaigns. Find out more today- book your free demo!